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When I think of Oscar Gamble, I think "best Afro in MLB" back in the day. His NYT obit even was titled "Oscar Gamble, Power Hitter With Prodigious Hair, Dies at 68." He was a really good player as well -- 17 years in the big leagues!! You don't stay around that long if you don't have a lot to offer skills-wise.

Jesse Gonder was, like all Mets of that early era, a symbol of utter mediocrity. Fact is, as a left-handed hitting catcher with a .251 lifetime average, he would've had a long, well paid career had he been playing today. Not that many catchers now -- even starting catchers -- hit that well. If you're decent defensively, you don't even have to hit .200 to get playing time.

Gonder and Pryor are no surprise to me, as they are uncommon names (especially Gonder). The odds of them being related were probably close to 100%. Pryor is a bit of a coincidence but not surprising at all. The fact that both Oscar and Kenny Gamble were BOTH related to a Gamble you met, has much, much lower odds than the other two. But, it is still well in the realm of possibility to make it also not terribly surprising.

I met a guy cross-country skiing in the back country on Mount San Jacinto, in California, and started talking to him, as people often do in places where you don't usually see anyone. I noticed the soft sound of his voice and his foreign accent in English - the 2 factors which gave away to me that he had been raised in Ruthenia (which is the very northwest portion of The Ukraine, its only portion west of The Carpathian Mountains. He also had a tinge of Yiddish accent in his voice. So, I knew he was a Jew who grew up in Ruthenia. That is where a portion of my family was from, most of whom came to Canada after WWII, brought over by my grandparents. After my mentioning that part of my family comes from there. we got to talking, and I found out that he is my cousin (twice removed). What are the odds of my meeting him in rural Southern California??? Not many people cross-country ski. How many Jewish Ruthenians from the small Stettels of Orshava or Bilke came to USA? I came there from Manitoba and Chicago. He came there from Mikelovce to Decin, to Prague, to Paris, to Miami, and then to L.A. I've lived in many other countries for many, many days and years, both before and since then. What were the odds of my meeting him on that day?

Related....Part II:Another coincidence story: I worked in Jordan for six years. We project professionals shared an apartment complex on a couple floors of a modern, high-rise apartment building. My n second year returning, I met one of the new project professionals. He was supposed to meet me when I came to the airport, but missed me, because I arrived wearing Arab clothing (robes headdress, sandals, etc. so, not being met, I took a taxi. When I arrived at our flat, I met the new housemate. We both had beards and mustaches. It took us 10 minutes of talking to realise that we were high school friends in Illinois, 15 years before! Amazing. He had been working for the lead International engineering firm in their international division for the past 14 years, and I had become a subcontractor to that firm one year before. I had worked in Canada and western USA for Native American and First Nation Native North American tribes for the past 7 years, and he had been working in Africa, and Indonesia for the past 15, and had married a Baha'i Indonesian woman, before we met up again.

What are the odds of all that??? Almost nil. And yet, coincidences like that happen, seemingly often.

No idea. My only schooling in USA was 2 years of High School, and 4 in University. If I'm a walking encyclopedia, I'm not even close to being complete. My brain is a storage bin for some ad hoc collections of unrelated data, with SI damage from years of memory loss. I'm sure the answer to your question has passed my ears and eyes a couple times. But it didn't stick.